USA Today AdMeter is a long-running consumer voting platform that captures audience ratings for Super Bowl commercials, making it one of the most visible advertising effectiveness measurement programs in the country. The project was a consulting engagement with STC Associates to develop a custom voting platform for capturing and processing user ratings during the Super Bowl broadcast window.
The custom administration interface was built using CodeIgniter, a PHP MVC framework, along with jQuery, AJAX, and Bootstrap for the UI layer. The admin interface needed to support real-time management of the voting platform — monitoring incoming votes, managing the commercial inventory being rated, and providing visibility into the rating data as it accumulated during and after the game.
Traffic handling was the defining technical challenge. Super Bowl-related web traffic is characterized by intense, highly concentrated spikes — the majority of votes come in during the game itself and in the immediate hours afterward. Polling API calls to the voting data layer needed to be optimized to handle these concurrency spikes without degrading response times or causing failures under peak load. This required careful attention to API call architecture, potential rate limiting, and back-end query efficiency.
The platform was built responsive for tablets and mobile devices, recognizing that Super Bowl viewers increasingly watch and interact with their phones or tablets alongside the television broadcast. A voting platform that doesn't work on mobile devices would miss a significant portion of its intended audience during the event.
